Looping videos typically include a sequence of frames that is repeated, such as to give an appearance of continuous motion. For example, a looping video may be played back by repeating frames of a user dribbling a basketball to give an appearance that the user dribbles the basketball in perpetuity. Looping videos, including animated GIFs, have gained tremendous popularity recently with the ease of video capture and the introduction of video sharing services. For example, more than one hundred million people watch videos on one such service, with over one billion videos played daily. The typical length of these videos may be short, such as from six to fifteen seconds and are popular on social networks, blogs, digital marketing, music clips and art because of this length.
Looping videos are typically used to capture key scene dynamics and can convey a richer meaning than a single photograph, but are more concise, portable, and sharable than long videos. Additionally, looping videos support efficient viewing because the user is presented with a repeated sequence and thus can automatically review the key scene dynamics again, e.g., to see something the user missed or “didn't quite catch” the first time viewing the video.
Conventionally, looping videos are created by cutting a short clip from a longer video. This frequently leads to abrupt changes from the last to the first frame and thus results in an uncomfortable experience when watching the frames played as a repeating loop. One popular technique that is used to mitigate the abruptness of this change is to play the video back-and-forth by concatenating a copy of the video in reverse order. While this alleviates abruptness due to change in location, the change in motion is still abrupt, and it often creates unrealistic motions due to time-reversal.
In contrast, artists, animators and professional photographers may manually create striking looping videos by perfectly “closing the loop” to form a seamless transition from the last frame back to the first frame. However, conventional techniques used to create the looping videos from casual video footage can be highly tedious or even impossible for some videos. Conventional techniques typically require a user to manually find the right cut locations in the video and align the two ends using professional video editing tools. Thus, these conventional manual techniques can be time consuming and require specialized knowledge of the user, which limits the usefulness and prevalence of the looping videos. Further, motion of objects within a frame may further complicate even manual techniques to create a looping video, which may make even conventional manual techniques ill-suited to create a looping video from a video that includes motion.